Friday, December 24, 2010

Mickey

Mickey grew up hacking systems.He knew how to open up everything from a combination lock to a RFID lock.He had intense knowledge of data structures, operating systems, cryptography, computer security, number theory etc.As a child he used to steal money from his parents cupboard.When he grew up he became interested in finding hacks to various computer games and then from there hacking file systems and so forth.

He once attempted to hack the ScientificChess secure database system but was caught snooping around the network by detective Red.Red was not really an engineer but had a keen eye for anything out of the ordinary happening in any system.

Red observed that there was one extra connection that usual in the system and with the help of Dr. Martin discovered that the extra connection was not anyone inside ScientificChess but a hacker outside.The team quickly tracked down the hacker, who happened to be Mickey.He was immediately offered the job at ScientificChess to work on computer security.

Mickey trivia:

Mickey’s biggest hacking attempt was that on the RSA encryption of a user at Bank of America.Mickey had made a large scale lookup table of large prime numbers and compared those against millions of public keys.One of the public keys happened to match the prime numbers in his lookup table and he took a shot at it.

Indeed, the encryption broke down for that one key, and Mickey was able to get into the account.Unfortunately, the account had nothing but the minimum of $25 in savings that were necessary just to keep the account open.Mickey realized most accounts were worthless, and so spending so much effort on unlocking one random account was unlikely to result in any reasonable gain.He did not take the $25 as that was not worth risking getting caught for.His lookup table, perhaps the most complex and exhaustive prime number multiplication table to ever exist in the world, continued to serve as a testing tool for the quantum computer at ScientificChess.